21 February 2008

Networking: A plethora of choices

By Jim Pinto

Technology is moving fast and going faster.

Companies constantly striving to achieve competitive advantage have many choices for installing and using networks, not only in business, but also in factory and manufacturing processes and throughout the enterprise.

The plethora of choices makes decisions difficult. One has to choose on what is available today, but be aware of emerging disruptive technologies, products, and software. It is important to have a strategy going forward.

Ethernet is everywhere. It is almost universal in the business environment and extends to factory and process automation environments even down to the device level. Some advocate industrial versions of Ethernet, which extends beyond more rugged hardware connections to use of industrial protocols and real-time extensions of TCP/IP. The question of whether Ethernet will penetrate right down to the field level has become closely linked to the real-time issue.

In the industrial environment, the old Fieldbus wars have given way to the dissemination of several standards at various levels in the hierarchy based on physical distance, speed of operation, real-time capabilities, and other application specific requirements. In the quest to attract wider usage and interoperability with competitors’ products, most proprietary networks have become “open” standards.

As defacto standards emerge in different industrial environments, most major companies profess to support all major industrial networks, to provide the product interoperability, which their customers, the end-users, seem to expect. However, some skirmishes continue between vendors who offer solutions for manufacturer-independent integration of field devices.

These battles pale into insignificance when one considers what is on the horizon. Wireless sensor networks are already becoming as important as the Internet itself. Just as the Internet allows access to digital information anywhere, sensor networks will provide vast arrays of real-time, remote interaction with the physical world. The industrial automation business will be generating significant growth in this new arena.

With WiFi (802.11) already widespread in the office and consumer environments, industrial automation is quickly adopting wireless technologies to take advantage of the overwhelming benefits.

With the spread of wired and wireless connectivity eventually reaching tens of billions of connections, machines will communicate with each other, as well as with data mining and processing systems that will automate the communication and interpretation of the mass of data they gather. This will add significant value for all businesses, suppliers, and end users alike.

Today, a whole new environment of machine-to-machine, or M2M, communications is emerging, focused on the issues of how machines communicate, how they are managed, how the data and information within them are managed, and perhaps most importantly, how the world (humans, businesses, and society) can deal with them.

The eventual goal will be to network devices that are self-sensing, self-controlling, and self-optimizing automatically, without human intervention. This represents new applications for information technology and telecom, which will totally subsume previous business models.

Related links:

• Industrial Ethernet for open automation Networks:
  http://r.listpilot.net/c/isa/1jdxcxi/14d0x
• OPC - the standard that makes other standards interoperable
  http://www.jimpinto.com/writings/opc.html
•  All networks have certain things in common:
  http://www.isa.org/Content/ContentGroups/InTech2/Features/20023/September8/All_networks_have_certain_things_in_common.htm

Behind the byline

Jim Pinto is an industry analyst and founder of Action Instruments. You can e-mail him at jim@jimpinto.com or view his writings at www.JimPinto.com. Read the Table of Contents of his book, Pinto’s Points, at www.jimpinto.com/writings/points.html.